Category Archives: event

Recently, the team at Flickr has been working to improve photo search. Before our work began, Flickr only knew about photo metadata — information about the photo included in camera-generated EXIF data, plus any labels the photo owner added manually like tags, titles, and descriptions. Ironically, Flickr has never before been able to “see” what’s in the photograph itself.

Over time, many of us have started taking more photos, and it has become routine — especially with the launch last year of our free terabyte* — for users to have many un-curated photos with little or no metadata. This has made it difficult in some cases to find photos, either your own or from others.

So for the first time, Flickr has started looking at the photo itself**. Last week, the Flickr team presented this technology at the May meeting of the San Francisco Hadoop User’s Group at our new offices in San Francisco. The presentation focuses on how we scaled computer vision and deep learning algorithms to Flickr’s multi-billion image collection using technologies like Apache Hadoop and Storm. (In a future post here, we’ll describe the learning and vision systems themselves in more detail.)

The Grid: How we show 10,000 photos on a page without crashing your browser, by Scott Schiller

Flickr’s latest Web-based Uploadr interface uses HTML5 APIs to push bytes en masse. Its real power, however, is the UI which enables users to add and edit the metadata of hundreds of photos while they are uploading in the background.

Handling the selection, display and management of large numbers of photos in a browser UI meant that the Uploadr project needed to be designed for scalability from the ground up.

This talk will go into some of the details of the Uploadr “Grid” UI, technical notes and performance findings made during its development.

Optimizing Touch Performance, by Stephen Woods

Touch interfaces are amazing. Touch devices are amazingly slow. Stephen Woods will share hard-won advice for building responsive touch-based interfaces using HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript. He also reveals how Star Trek: The Next Generation predicted the need for instant user feedback in a touch-based UI and how Tivos slow UI was made bearable by a simple “bloop” sound.